BRAIN AND LANGUAGE 11, 159-169 (1980) Some Aspects of Phonological Impairment in Aphasia GABRIELE MICELI, GUIDO GAINOTTI, CARLO CALTAGIRONE, AND CARLO MASULLO Universitd Cattolica of Rome, Italy The relationships between expressive and receptive phonemic disorders and between disturbances of phoneme processing and general disorders of auditory comprehension were studied in 69 aphasic patients, by means of a phoneme discrimination test and of a standard aphasia battery. A significant but incomplete correlation between disorders of phonemic output and of phoneme analysis was found. The view is put forth that in some patients only phoneme encoding or decoding is disturbed, whereas in others a central level of phoneme processing is impaired. A significant but partial correlation was also found between disorders of phonological analysis and general disorders of auditory comprehension. This supports the view that, besides sequential phonological analysis, other processes operate in auditory comprehension. The search for a correspondence between the impairment in speech perception and production at the various levels of language integration has been the object of recent studies. The first authors to suggest such a correspondence were Alajouanine, Lhermitte, Ledoux, Renaud, and Vig- nolo (1964). From the examination of two selected groups of patients with pure phonemic and semantic jargon respectively they concluded that only the former group made significant proportions of phonemic discrimination errors. Levinsohn (1%9, quoted by Lesser, 1978) studied both phoneme perception and production in individual aphasics, concluding that each patient tended to produce erroneously the phonemes he poorly perceived, and vice versa. Gainotti, Caltagirone, and Ibba (1975) administered their Sound and Meaning Discrimination Test to an unselected population of aphasics: phonemic Wernicke aphasics showed no more than a trend to make phonemic errors. In both Alajouanine’s and in Gainotti’s tests, however, multiple choices or same-different judgments involved lan- This work was supported in part by a grant from the Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche. Address reprint requests to Dr. Gabriele Miceli, Clinica Neurologica, Universita Cattolica, Largo A. Gemelli 8, 00168 Roma, Italy. 159 0093-934x/80/050159-1 1$02.00/0 Copyright @ 1960 by Academic Press, Inc. All rights of reproduction in any form reserved.